CHAPTER THIRTEEN

 

 

I called Amanda and told her briefly about my meeting. Judging by her slurred words, she was well past drunk.

“Why don’t you take it easy,” I chided her.

“I have a lot of tension in my life right now,” she said in excuse of her behavior.

“And your life is in danger,” I countered. “You need to be able to think clearly.”

“I’m thinking just fine, thank you,” she said, acid in her voice.

I let that be. “Do you know the name of Maggie Delacroix’s daughter? One who was a friend with a girl who was murdered?”

Amanda hissed into the phone before answering. “Janet.” She didn’t want to tell me, but she knew she had to.

“Do you know the friend’s name? The girl who was murdered?”

“No,” she said.

“Where did Janet go to college?”

“I don’t know.” Anger rose in her voice.

I hung up before I could hear her start to ramble about me prying into areas I didn’t need to. I drove to my office, checked my messages, none of which needed my immediate attention, and spent an hour tracking down the license plate of the car I’d seen leave the restaurant last night. The sedan belonged to Enterprise Car Rental, a dead end for me. I retrieved the mail, which consisted of bills and a box of oranges, shipped fresh from my parents. I took the box and headed up into the mountains west of Denver. Maggie, who said she didn’t have any information to share, had told me quite a bit. Now it was time to call in some help.

* * * * *

“She sounds like quite a lady,” said my friend, Cal Whitmore. Cal is akin Sherlock Holmes. He has more knowledge loaded into his brains than the Smithsonian has items on display. The guy seems to know every obscure thing there is to know about everything. However, unlike Holmes, Cal has a hard time finding his way out of the house. He’s brilliant but has little common sense.

I had finished relating everything that had happened since I’d taken on Amanda as a client, and was sitting in Cal’s office cum computer room. The rest of his house was sparse, but his computer room was cutting edge. Cal boasted things that probably weren’t on the market, certainly stuff I wasn’t familiar with, nor did I know how to use. He had a hard drive filled with a variety of musical genres that he listened to on state-of-the-art speakers, and watched DVDs on one of his four computers, the one with the thirty-inch screen. Stacks of papers, manuals, and other assorted computer stuff were piled against one wall, and boxes of disks, wire, CDs, and other accessories leaned against another wall. I could write my name on the dust that covered everything except the computers, and at any given time dishes, cups, glasses, beer bottles, and soda cans littered the room. He owned the house, but the computer room was where Cal lived. “Maggie is a mystery in and of herself,” I said, throwing Cal an orange from my parents.

He caught it deftly. “These are good ones, known for their sweetness.” Cal tossed it from one hand to the other. “A Valencia orange.”

I knew from the package the oranges came in that he was correct, but he hadn’t seen the box. “How do you know that?” I shouldn’t have been shocked, but I was. I’ve known Cal since grade school, and I’ve seen him deduce amazing things.

“It’s pretty easy, really,” Cal said in a matter-of-fact tone.

I nodded my head and waited for more.

He held the orange up to a small desk lamp, examining it. “See its color, the green blemishes, and how it seems kind of marked?” He pointed to a faint streak on the skin of the orange. “That’s called wind-scarring. Comes from the Florida breezes. The warm temperatures cause chlorophyll to return to the peel, giving it the greenish color. The skin’s thin, and,” he gently squished the orange, “it’s easy to squeeze.”

“That’s impressive,” I said.

“Besides, your parents are in Florida, right?” I nodded my head. “This is the season for Valencias. It’s too late for Hamlins or Navels.” I stared at him. “I put all the information together,” he said blandly in answer to my awe. He looked closely at the orange, then squeezed it again. “It’s ripe.”

“Mom thought I’d enjoy them,” I said. “She says ‘hi’, by the way.” Mom has a soft spot for Cal, ever since I brought him home one afternoon after school, crying from a bee sting he’d suffered when he put his face right up to a furiously buzzing hive.

“Tell her I said ‘hey’.” He smiled. “Anyway, the season for Valencias is ending, but you can still get some good ones.” Cal bit into the peel and grimaced. No common sense. I shook my head as he spat out the rind. I had a hard time envisioning Holmes doing that.

“Even if the skin is thin, it helps if you peel it,” I said, taking the fruit from him. I peeled the rind off and handed back a juicy section, keeping some for myself.

“So what do you need me to help with?” Cal asked as he turned back to his computer, not fazed by his mishap with the orange. Cal’s specialty was computer viruses and virus protection. He was more than his own business, he was like a computer god. Cal was involved with people and groups that I didn’t even want to know about. He could hack into almost any system, even the Pentagon’s. Cal was a recluse, lived on the fringes of the law, and rarely ventured anywhere. He almost didn’t exist, and if he wanted to, he could make himself disappear.

“I have the license plate number of the woman Amanda passed the comic to.” I flopped on an ancient love seat across from him, throwing my legs over the arm and letting my feet dangle. “It belongs to Enterprise Car Rental.” I waved clouds of dust away from my face.

“I’m listening.” He typed on the keyboard while talking. “Who played Ole Andersen in the 1956 film The Killers?”

“Burt Lancaster,” I said through another bite of orange. “I highly doubt an organization like this would use real names, or credit cards, so I’m not going to waste anymore time with that. But if I could follow the money trail, it would eventually have to lead to some real person who wants access to the money.” Cal nodded. “Is that something you could help with?”

“Sure, that’s easy,” Cal said, running a hand through his wavy brown hair. “What information did Amanda give you?”

“I’ve got the account number that she wired the money to, and the name of the bank in the Cayman Islands.”

Cal laughed. “That sounds like something out of a movie. Wire it to my account in the Caymans,” he spoke in a scratchy, quiet, Marlon Brando voice.

“Tell me about it,” I said. I threw a piece of peel at the back of his head. It sailed by his right ear and landed by the computer speaker. He didn’t even notice. “Have you ever heard of an organization of women called the X Women?”

He wagged his head back and forth in a negative response. “Who wrote, directed, and starred in Touch of Evil?”

“Orson Welles. How do you find out about a group like that?” I situated myself more comfortably on the couch. “These women act like it’s no big deal to be asking around and then being told about a group that kills people. You should’ve seen Maggie and Amanda. They talk as if they’re trying to find someone to help them invest their money.”

Cal stopped typing. “What was the name of the group?”

“The X Women.”

Cal connected to the Internet, and typed “X Women” into the search line. I could see a list of web sites appear on the screen.

“Whoa, should’ve known that would happen,” Cal said.

“What?” I didn’t have the energy to get off the couch.

“The X Women. Anything with ‘X’ in it is bound to bring up some porn sites.” He scrolled through the list. “Here’s one for a women’s water polo event. Doubt that’s it.” He clicked and went to the next screen. “No, not there.” He scanned through more of the results, periodically clicking on a site. He read off some of the names, but none of them had anything to do with an underground group of any kind, or killers for hire, not that either of us thought we would find a web site. “I’ll spend some time looking into that.” Cal said. “There might be something on the hack sites.”

I nodded, contemplating the designs on his ceiling. “This is what I’m wondering. They have to be organized somehow, and have connections, and that sort of thing, right? If wealthy women can find out about them, we should be able to.”

“They can’t exactly advertise in the Yellow Pages.”

“Duh,” I said. “But I’m a detective; I should be able to find them, right?” Cal shrugged. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

He was smiling, I could tell. “What is considered the first film noir film?”

“The Maltese Falcon. It’s a great movie,” I said.

“Who directed it?”

“John Huston. It was his directorial debut.” I sat up. “What're you doing?”

Cal tapped the computer screen. “A detective film noir crossword puzzle.”

“Oh.” Cal may know a lot, but I was the old-movie buff, especially old detective movies. I moved over to the computer and looked over his shoulder. He had the puzzle almost completed, which showed he knew almost as much as me in this area.

“You’d better be careful,” Cal said. “If Amanda had anything to do with Peter’s death, she could be capable of anything, too.”

“I hear you.” I pointed to the screen. “That’s D.O.A.”

Cal typed in the answer. “Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan starred in a remake of an original movie starring Edmund O’Brien? I didn’t know that.”

I laughed. Rare words from Cal.

* * * * *

I left Cal’s house around midnight. He had his assignment. He was going to follow the money trail, and he would find out anything he could on the X Women. I didn’t know how much time I had with any of this. The X Women wanted something from Amanda, and I didn’t think they’d wait to get it. On top of that, I also needed to figure out what happened to Peter Ghering. Was Amanda telling the truth? She appeared to be, so that brought up another question: where was Peter? And why did the X Women spare his life?

I mulled over the conversation with Cal as I made the journey back to downtown Denver. Cal lived in the foothills west of Denver, off of Highway 285 past the mountain community of Pine Junction. I followed a winding dirt road to 285, turned left and on to 285, and drove in the moonlight back to Denver. I was alone on the road, but still sped cautiously over the winding road, slowing as I rounded a sharp bend. When I came out of the curve, a full-size SUV pulled in behind my Forerunner. Despite its bulk, the SUV quickly gained speed behind me. I accelerated until I was going ten over the speed limit, but the driver of the SUV kept pace with me. I glanced uneasily in my rear view mirror as the SUV headlights inched closer and closer toward the rear end of my vehicle. I picked up more speed, but the SUV stayed right on my tail.

“Okay, I’m going,” I muttered, watching my speed top seventy as I veered around a sharp turn. The road dropped off a few feet on the right, the direction where the momentum of the turn was pulling me. I felt the left wheels of the Forerunner lose grip with the road for a second, then regain traction. The SUV matched my speed as we roared around another bend. The road straightened. I sped up, the speedometer going over eighty, but the headlights glared right in my rear-view mirror. I looked for a pullout, a wider spot on the road that allowed slower cars to pull over and let others pass, but I saw none.

"Get off my ass," I muttered.

I gripped the wheel tighter as we rounded another dangerous turn and hit the brakes, slowing down. The SUV headlights disappeared from the mirror. I braced for a hit, unconsciously hitting the gas. The Forerunner leaped forward, coming within inches of the guardrail on the right. I caught a brief glimpse of blackness dropping off into space before I eased up on the pedal. My tires screamed, but kept their purchase on the pavement. I raced around three more bends with the SUV on my tail. I gritted my teeth, knowing that soon the road widened into two lanes. I whipped around another crazy turn and the road suddenly widened, giving the SUV room to pass.

“Ha!” I yelled, easing up on the gas. “Go on by, asshole!”

The SUV stayed behind me for another five seconds as I slowed down, then pulled into the other lane and sped up. The driver pulled parallel to me, jerked the wheel, and the side of the SUV loomed in my face. I again prepared to die as I drove the Forerunner dangerously close to the shoulder of the road. I had exhausted any more pavement, but the SUV suddenly pulled into the left lane and raced forward. Before it disappeared, I noticed that the left taillight was broken. Last Friday night, someone paid me a visit complete with a baseball bat beating. That someone was sending a message again.

I slowed to a stop and parked on the side of the road, at once furious and grateful. For a moment I clenched the wheel and shook violently. A dark thought occurred to me. Maybe the X Women were after me, too. I shuddered and forced myself to breathe evenly. After a minute, I pulled carefully back onto the road and drove home, more fearful than I’d been in a long time.